Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations | Session 5A, Panel
Chair and Organiser: Anne Walthall (University of California, Irvine)
Efforts to construct the past as an exercise in collective memory are not unique to postwar Japan. From Kojiki forward, rulers have tried to control historical memory and its use as a political weapon, and memories of the past have shaped national identities, at least among the elite. The Edo period saw significant historiographical debates over interpretations of the past that directly affected how people saw their function in the social and political order. Even in the late nineteenth century, historical consciousness in Japan took on different shadings depending on which side one took in 1868. We propose a panel focused on how various visions of the past functioned politically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By grounding our approach in discursive texts, we aim to examine how specific pasts were remembered at these times, their political import, and their connection with larger social forces. In particular we plan to focus on how popular writers, scholars, and bureaucrats tried to make and control histories that shaped contemporary understandings of politics, morality, and national identity.
Anne Walthall will examine official, unofficial, and popular histories of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi and his favorites to uncover a co mmon understanding of what constituted meaningful information about the past in the eighteenth century. Although limited by censorship and the restrictions placed on political participation, these texts speak to the construction of a collective memory of the Genroku era that relied less on what historians today consider verifiable evidence than on the power of the popular imagination.
Kate Wildman Nakai (Sophia University)
Kate Wildman Nakai will examine how thinkers of the late Mito school attempted to reconstruct historical memory of kamiyo, the age of the gods described in Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Confronting earlier allegorical elaborations and more recent Kokugaku interpretations of kamiyo, the late Mito scholars fashioned a highly selective version of kamiyo, deriving from the "records of antiquity" evidence of a seamless fusion of loyalty and filial piety and a model for instruction of the populace through the "unity of rites and governance" (saisei itchi).
Anna Beerens (Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies, Leiden University)
Anna Beerens will examine the image of the Tokugawa period as it emerges from Kyûji shimonroku, a research project of the Department of National History of the Imperial University of Tôkyô, conducted during the years 1891 and 1892. In an attempt to recover and preserve firsthand memory of Bakufu institutions and practices, a team of historians from this department interviewed a number of former shogunal officials. The project not only gave the "vanquished" a chance to rehabilitate themselves as an institution, it also presents members of the Old Regime as actual human beings, consciously and unconsciously expressing highly personal experiences and views.